Grupo ABC: S.F ad agency Pereira & O'Dell breaks from Brazilian parent

Pereira & O'Dell, an advertising agency known for the long-form digital video campaigns it has created for clients like Skype, is breaking away from its holding company, a move that goes against an industry trend toward consolidation. The San Francisco agency is set to buy back about 70 percent of itself from the Brazilian advertising holding company Grupo ABC, which provided financial backing when Pereira & O'Dell formed in 2008. With the buyback, Pereira will go it alone in an industry dominated by enormous ad-holding companies like Omnicom, Publicis and WPP. [...] the agency created a campaign for Skype that showed examples of how people use the service. For another client, Intel, the agency created a series in 2012 called "The Beauty Inside," about a man who wakes up as a different person every day, which won a Daytime Emmy Award. [...] the agency made a series for Intel and Dell, "What Lives Inside," which is streaming on Hulu and was directed by Robert Stromberg, who has won two Academy Awards for art direction. "The first thing I look for is an agency that's fearless," said Angie Hill, the general manager of Skype audience marketing at Microsoft.